


Burn Down This River Every Time

by tanktrilby



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, M/M, agent! Kaneki, and who let Hide join the secret service anyway, but now they have guns, everyone is human, handler! Hide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-06 18:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4232358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanktrilby/pseuds/tanktrilby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Secret service AU:</p><blockquote>
  <p>Hide’s smile touches his eyes. Kaneki’s stupefied and a little dismayed to find that a handler like that exists.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The morning of the day he went back to Tokyo, Kaneki stood on the porch watering his plants. He had pet fish too, and an accumulation of stray cats that napped all over his furniture, but the rubber plants -potted, cheap and endearingly ugly- were his favorite.

It was still early. He planned to drive himself to the airport at nine, giving him at least two hours to get ready. On his way he would stop at the village’s sole grocery, and buy his paper. In the absence of anything else he clung to routine with childish fervor, though he rarely did much except scan the headlines. He had a habit of making mundane thoughts scurry in circles when he doesn’t want to think about something in particular, and the newspaper would provide the distraction he needed. His mind was still a blade, uselessly sharp in his retirement, and everything he read still got stored away in an ever-vigilant part of his mind, far away from his waking conscious. He was aware -and not aware- that the CCG scandal still raged on. GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION HEAVILY REVISES EDUCATION POLICY, quoted his memory from last week’s paper, with emphasis on the bolded letters. ORGANIZATION EXECUTIVES UNDER INQUIRY. News from a far-off world. News that didn’t concern him. The lack of connection made it easy to think about.

He made himself a light breakfast of two egg sandwiches and ate it reading his book, feeding the two cats that stirred awake and bumped against his legs expectantly. He ended up feeding nearly all of it to the cats and only making it halfway through a page of the book. He stood up and washed his plate, neatly stacking it away. There was a strange stillness clouding his whole body that made it feel like he wasn’t real, passing through the air without disturbing it. At the same time, he felt like he was made of glass, and the next strong wind would topple him over, leaving him a mess of shards on the floor.

He poured himself some barley tea the neighbors had brought over the day before. The doors were open, letting in slants of slow-growing sunlight to wash against the floor. The house looked empty no matter how much of an impression Kaneki tried to make in it -leaving books sprawled across the floor, hanging up vaguely soothing landscapes in soft pastel colors, the _endless cats-_ but the habit of living without grazing the surfaces was proving hard to break.

As time ticked on, the lethargy that soaked his limbs faded naturally; Kaneki was not a lethargic man. He washed his cup as well, and set it near his plate. He got dressed methodically, trousers first, white shirt and coat. Perhaps unfitting for a funeral, but he felt like he wanted to be recognized, and it didn’t matter by who.

This in itself was worrying, same as the way the periods of utter immobility like earlier -when Kaneki couldn’t twitch a single muscle, felt like he wasn’t even real- were growing more and more frequent. Kaneki thought he was like a machine that was systematically taking itself apart: he had no use in this world anymore, and the knowledge was eroding him from the inside out. Something fundamental inside him had finally snapped.

He gave the house one more look-over before locking the doors and stepping outside. It was a nice day, and the forecast had mentioned that the weather of the past few weeks would hold out for some time. He didn’t let himself think of Hide very often, but he thought that this would have been the perfect sort of day to see him again; Hide shined best under natural light. Perhaps in one of those cafés with the startlingly similar menus he liked to drag Kaneki into, just to laugh as Kaneki made faces at the sweets.

Touka had told him concisely what would happen to him if he was stupid enough to show his face at the funeral. She had used her brilliant flume of swears and threats, vicious in her concern, but Kaneki hadn’t heard a word, never planned to listen.

He locked his door before he left. There was a slip of notepaper in his pocket, worn thin and torn at the edges. After he left, the house fell quiet, and it was almost like he’d never been there at all.

*

****

**_-5 years_ **

“…is he for real,” Kaneki says, not really bothering to keep his voice down.

The kid from the CCG makes a series of betrayed faces at him. “Kanekiiii,” he whines, then adds, as a flippant afterthought, “-san. Kaneki-san. Is that Touka-chan? Is it? Say hi for me!”

“Tough luck,” Touka says. There’s a suspicious whir on her end that precedes everything she says- is she _recording_ this? “Told you he was hard to handle, but you pulled that jaded warrior bullshit on me. Serves you right.”

“ _Hard to handle_ isn’t the same as _does stupid magic tricks for kids he met on the street,”_ Kaneki growls.

The kid -Hide, short for Hideyoshi, short for The Most Irritating Case Officer on the Planet, 22 years old, _same as you, Kaneki-san!-_ is now slurping his milkshake and darting little glances at Kaneki that make his skin prickle. It’s not threatening, it’s just really, really annoying. Kaneki is offended on behalf of the CCG if this was one of their best and brightest.

This… isn’t what he was expecting when Yoshimura-san announced that Anteiku would be working alongside the Bureau. The CCG was a branch of the Ministry of Defense which was part of the Japanese government, which Kaneki had always assumed was the enemy. Apparently not; Anteiku was toeing the line but wasn’t outright illegal, and their recent series of victories against those Aogiri bastards had made the upstanding citizens on the right side of the law very eager to join forces.

Well, whatever. Kaneki wasn’t hired to sweat the details; he was hired to _get things done. Getting things done_ sometimes meant using one or more of his wide range of talents, which included fluency in four languages, a soft voice and a smile like moonlight, a knack for spatial calculations for long-range sniping, and a thorough understanding of the human body and how it could be taken apart. He had a reputation for _not_ having a reputation, making him one of the best agents in the field.

Not that you could tell Hide that. When Kaneki points out he’s best known as Centipede - a code name that echoes through the underground attached to the measured but savage destruction Kaneki specializes in- Hide shakes his head firmly.

“Nope,” says Hide.

Kaneki’s chopsticks creak in his grip. He carefully loosens his fingers one by one. “What do you mean, nope.”

“You look more like a Cottonbud to me,” Hide says, gesturing at Kaneki. “With the, you know. White everything.”

Then Hide beams, bright and blinding with a touch of wickedness, like he’d run circles around Kaneki if he dropped his guard for a second. _He’s actually supposed to be some kind of prodigy,_ Touka had grudgingly admitted. _Top of his class at nerd school, and apparently he’s the reason Aogiri’s attack on Cochlea went balls-up. Green as all hell, though, so have fun training up their star rookie._ Kaneki comes close to believing it; Hide responds to visual cues without a hitch and the way his eyes flash across the room at the tiniest movement is really kind of beautiful. He just might be the most perceptive person Kaneki’s ever met. And it follows to reason that he’s just as good at his job.

Kaneki could do without the chatter, though.

“Caramel,” he says without thinking.

Hide’s inanities grind to a halt before he gives a theatrical groan. “My codename, you mean? Come on, you’re not even trying.” He fidgets a little. “Go for something cooler, Kanekiiii.” A beat. “-san.”

Kaneki eyes him, supremely unimpressed. “Yellow everything,” he murmurs significantly, sliding his eyes over the offensively yellow hair to the offensively yellow jacket to the offensively yellow backpack. In the process, he distantly notes that Hide has very pretty collarbones indeed.

And to richen the hues of sunny yellow, golden- brown eyes, crackling with a dancing fire, more mischief than anyone in their twenties has a right to have.

Kaneki, admittedly, has limited experience with handlers. He’s renown as a lone wolf, although Touka prefers to call it being _too fucking arrogant for anyone to be able to stand you, let alone run backup,_ and he likes it that way. But sometimes, Anteiku takes contracts with organizations that are too twitchy for their own good, and, wary of his reputation for destruction, saddle him with a case officer to drag along with him on missions. And they were all the same type: distant, rigid, and they all considered their agents to be remote controlled dolls doing their dirty work for them.

Hide’s smile touches his eyes. Kaneki’s stupefied and a little dismayed to find that a handler like that exists.

“Caramel,” he repeats definitely, making Hide pout at him. “Tasteless and yellow.”

“I actually like the flavor, so joke’s on you,” Hide sings, slurping at his milkshake. “Maybe one day you’ll open your heart to the joys of caramel too!”

Kaneki keeps staring. Hide beams back, unfazed. “Take good care of me, Kaneki-san!”

*

Their first mission goes about as well as expected. It’s in an island so small it gets blotted out in maps, just off the coast of Malaysia. There’s a lot of running and some hiding involved, but for most part Kaneki just waits around for the predicted opening with Hide chattering away in his ear.

Hide, as Kaneki had first suspected, has a real gift for background noise. He listens more often than he lets on, and is a little amused by the rapid subject changes: one second, Hide’s going on about the horrible living conditions of whales in zoological parks, then shoots directly over to lamenting the tricky part of Metal Gear Solid that he’s gotten stuck in. He follows no easily identifiable line of thought; Kaneki’s irresistibly reminded of a monkey, swinging from branch to branch on a path of its own.

It’s not…unpleasant. Kaneki had told Hide to tone it down and threatened to chuck his earpiece, but it was actually like the soothing ocean wave sounds played in most exec offices. Hide quite possibly had a screw loose somewhere, but so far, Kaneki didn’t mind.

Hide’s monkey brain has somehow led him to the subject of summer sweaters when Kaneki says, “Wait.”

Hide’s monologue dies with a questioning hum. After a beat of silence, he speaks again.

“Target has passed Point A,” Hide says evenly. “Thirty-two minutes ahead of schedule. It’s possible he’s expecting us, Cottonbud.”

Kaneki nods. From the abandoned building he’s in, he can see the bright head of the foreign agent moving silently and purposefully along the opposite street. After a second, he looks around, and nimbly scoots up to a roof and continues that way.

“Definitely expecting trouble,” Hide notes.

Kaneki swings himself easily out the window and into a neighboring balcony, sidestepping the clothesline with a line of T-shirts hanging on it. He lopes across towards the next roof, and within a few seconds he’s a matter of two buildings away from their target.

“Okay, his friend’s already busy with the local police and that creepy guy from the Triads,” says Hide. “So I’d say wait until he gets back down-”

Kaneki fires a shot and gets the foreign agent’s leg.

“ _Whoa.”_ Hide clears his throat. “Okay, or you can do that. Cool. It’s your call, man.”

Kaneki raises an eyebrow. Case officers were notoriously anal retentive about improvisations and ignoring their optimum plans, and Kaneki was mostly known for his wild spontaneous takedowns. The niggling suspicion he has that Hide hadn’t been assigned to him at random after all gets reinforced.

“If he gets to the next street corner, there’s a chance the mercs might spot us,” Kaneki explains flippantly. “You don’t see them, but they’re here.”

He gets the target again, this time on the dominant hand- he’s a crack shot but he thinks Irimi-san might have been able to shoot a finger off from this distance.

 He bounds over, and the target punches at him, a neat, efficient swing. Kaneki dodges left, breaks his momentum by veering right, and brings his knee up to the target’s stomach, winding him.

After that it’s a quick job of restraint. Kaneki pats down the agent’s coat and finds what he’s looking for in one of the inside pockets- a light, sleek package that weighs about the same as a manga volume.

“Copies?” Kaneki asks, casually stepping on the target’s injured hand, making blood glug out faster.

The man’s face goes ugly with pain. “Didn’t make any,” he grunts.

Kaneki presses harder and twists his foot a little.

“ _Fuck,_ I’m not lying, that’s it!” The agent’s leg kicks at Kaneki a little, and Kaneki gives him a swift, sharp kick to the ribs, hard enough to crack a few.

“Are you sure,” Kaneki says softly.

“I _am,”_ wheezes the agent. “…said…too precious…can’t risk having copies.”

“Sounds about right,” Hide says thoughtfully. “They’re being really tight-lipped about this, but considering the positioning that thing’s probably been nicked from the National Laboratory by accessing the Gaia Center downtown. All the guys who hired us are willing to say is that it’s too risky to have copies scattered around on either side.”

Kaneki considers this. The basic requirements of the job have been met, and he doesn’t think that he overlooked anything that might hound him personally. Anything beyond that is none of his business.

He takes the agent out in one shot, and hauls the body over to the side of the building and into a narrow street.

“Oh,” says Hide.

Kaneki doesn’t say anything.

“No, that wasn’t _oh, you didn’t have to kill him,_ because you absolutely did and it’s your job,” Hide says quickly, interpreting his silence as disdain for the rookie. He’s not completely wrong. “I _have_ had assignments like this before. It was _oh,_ as in, _oh, the police is coming to arrest you and better haul ass.”_

Kaneki -who had already made it into the stolen car and started up the ignition- freezes up.

“Cottonbud?”

Kaneki can’t help it. He throws his head back, and bursts out laughing.

“And you say I’m the weird one,” Hide grumbles. Kaneki’s already nearing the docks -where the motorboat is still hopefully waiting where he left it- and he’s still chuckling.

“Oh, you absolutely are,” Kaneki says, grinning harder when Hide groans.

*

Hide’s superiors - a gathering of mysterious figures Hide likes to describe with great exaggeration- seem to be content enough by their partnership, and no one listens when Kaneki complains about Hide singing awful English songs through the comms in their off periods. But they click, unquestionably and entirely, and even Kaneki has to admit that his job’s much easier with Hide around. Hide, for all his oddities and inexplicable warmth, is almost ruthlessly competent and cautious by nature. Over the course of the months they work together, Kaneki grudgingly rethinks his opinion on the CCG’s educational policies while Hide laughs at him for being an elitist.

Eventually, they find themselves in Jakarta on an anonymous tip-off the CCG seems to be very excited about. They have backup, which is new; Kaneki is bemused by the five-man team that contacts them and requests for orders. But ultimately, it still comes down to Kaneki doing the dirty work with Hide being enthusiastic in his earpiece.

It’s not until Kaneki’s ditched the car in a mountainous junkyard that Hide speaks up. “Estimated arrival time in two minutes. Their firewall’s down, I’m working on the secondary locks. Everything’s in position, buddy, looks like you’re good to go.”

Hide goes silent again and Kaneki snorts, halfway amused. “Copy that, Caramel.”

“Mm?” Hide murmurs, soft and distracted. On his end Kaneki can hear the steady _clack-clack_ of typing and he imagines Hide in his hotel room a city over, tangled in his maze of tech, tasteless orange headphones over his ears. “Something funny?”

“Not really.” Hide will be _impossible_ if Kaneki told him he’s kind of cool like this, the way he goes all quiet and laser-focused when he’s being Kaneki’s ears and eyes. Kaneki can hear him breathe when he isn’t speaking, and likes listening to it.

Hide makes a considering little noise. “Tsunderes gonna tsun~” he sings, clearly out of habit. “Oh cool, all clear.”

 Kaneki cracks a single knuckle. It’s been a while since he’d had to force his way in- the CCG mostly gave him a series of ghost jobs, possibly unused to having his level of firepower on their side. Kaneki has no objections to the missions where he sneaks in and out, where no one realizes that they’ve been sabotaged until months after he’s gone, but they get a tad repetitive after a while.

He takes out the guards stationed at the entrance with little to no trouble; all five men go down easily and silently, and after he snaps the last one’s neck Kaneki moves on, into the heart of the building. He has the map memorized, and heads left continuously in a steady glide.

“Two guys coming down the stairs,” Hide murmurs, just as Kaneki hears the creak of their footsteps. He readies his automatic, counts down the seconds, and fires off two quick, soundless shots, each hitting right between the eyes. 

Not much effort has been spared to maintain this place, and it shows- the lighting is poor and uneven, and there’s a weirdly twisting layout that even the best security detail in the world would find impossible to guard. Officially, it’s a shopping mall gone out of business in the old unused part of town, slated to be demolished in the next year. Kaneki passes grimy shop windows, their doors missing like empty eye sockets, the wiring ripped out of the walls. It’s owned by a front company that has its roots buried pretty deep, but the timing means that they’re probably after Aogiri Tree.

“Direct line to the target,” Hide says. “Eleven more guards, three immediately coming up in nine…eight…seven-”

The element of surprise is firmly on Kaneki’s side, and he forges through the second floor easily, swapping guns when the clip in the first runs out. A few run at him blindly and he stops their momentum short, bringing bodies down smoothly and without effort. He dodges a few strikes and clumsy shots, and they’re all down before anyone can get a clear grip on what’s happening. It’s so easy it’s almost suspicious.

Kaneki maintains his guard even as the locks of the single heavily-reinforced steel door of the building slides open -courtesy of Hide- and he steps in, quickly taking out the guy at the desk that’s gaping at him in surprise.

“Cottonbud?” Hide asks when Kaneki falters slightly.

“Nothing,” Kaneki mutters back. The feeling of being watched persists. “Check if there’s anything else on the other floors.”

There’s a soft whooshing sound as Hide exhales. “On it,” is all he says, and Kaneki is distantly grateful.

The building checked out earlier, of course, and there’s no reason for there to be any kind of activity on the other floors. But there’s a disjointedness that nags at his instincts. It just doesn’t sit right.

Kaneki jams the flash-drive into the computer and starts up the process of copying the hard drive while he waits. His mind’s racing, but his movements are practiced and smooth, and the copy is nearly done when Hide finally speaks again.

“Fuck,” Hide says, brief and sharp, before he recovers. “Heat reading on fourth floor. The patterns mean it’s probably a kid.”

Kaneki nods. “Room number?”

“Um,” some tap-tapping. “402. Used to be a storage closet.”

Kaneki makes an abortive motion to start running, but pulls back at the last minute. “Leaving my position might compromise the mission.”

He keeps his words light and suggestive. The muscles in his legs ache with the need to go and check, but Hide is still technically a superior, plus a direct representative of the organization that ran the whole show. He has to go with whatever call Hide makes here.

“ _Fuck that_ ,” Hide says, and the steel in his voice startles Kaneki. Hide’s _angry._ He’d had an inkling, before, when he’d mentioned how undertrained the staff was and Hide had agreed, but Hide had been hiding how frustrated he really was at the farce this assignment was turning out to be. Kaneki guessed that Hide was new enough to never been the hired muscle to shake up an enemy before, as a brutal show of strength. “Go. The kid comes first, no matter who it is. It’s not like there’s anyone who can take you down in this bullshit mission.”

Kaneki goes. He keeps his gun ready, his head clear- caution isn’t something he can unlearn, no matter how distracting the thought of Hide’s eyes blazing is. The plan is slowly changing but it’s still manageable, and Kaneki has no intention of fucking this one up.

“This floor’s clear,” Hide says. He’s seemingly cooled down while Kaneki was sprinting, and he sounds more intense than ever.

Kaneki follows his directions to the corridor, keeping the layout of the building in mind. The room Hide’s talking about is nothing more than a slim door in the middle of old, deserted shops, the doorknob busted- one kick makes it hang off one of the hinges and swing creakily free, and Kaneki raises his gun and calls, “I’m coming in.”

No sounds except the far-off rumble of traffic in the city. Hide’s breaths are soft and intimate in his ear, waiting.

Finally, Kaneki takes one step inside, lightly. Hide’s run countless checks but Kaneki wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t picked up early on in his career how to be careful, and what happened to the bastards who did a sloppy job.

His sharp eyes pick up on a huddle in the furthermost corner.

“Hello,” Kaneki says. No response. When he mutes his breathing and strains his ears hard enough, he can hear a series of tiny breaths even from this distance.

“Alive,” he tells Hide shortly. “Unconscious. Body-checking it…her now.”

“Take her out with you,” Hide says back, just as short. “Pick the flash drive on the way, it’s completed the operation now.”

In the light, the kid’s skin is waxy pale, the brown hair brittle and thin. The dark circles around her eyes are impressive, and hint extreme fatigue, starvation and a touch of dehydration as well. Kaneki carries her downstairs on his back, gathering her arms in one hand in a grip strong enough to leave plum-colored bruises on the skin. He carries his gun in the other.

Once back on the second floor, he heads over to the office and retrieves the flash disk. Hide had planned out an exit plan for him before, so he sticks to it, taping the flash drive to his side before he leaves. On high alert, now expecting trouble more than ever, he picks his way through the same route he came in. He wonders how Hide’s going to prepare for this, whether he’s discussing it with his superiors. Even the slightest change in a plan had the potential for disaster, and coming back with an extra little girl was a major fucking change.

“It’s being taken care of,” Hide tells him presently. He sounds calm, almost mechanical. “No changes to the original exit plan. A car will be waiting for you outside in T minus fifty seconds and you’re supposed to deposit the child in there.” He pauses. “The way should be clear for the next six seconds before the feed refreshes, so keep that in mind.”

Kaneki grunts. About five seconds to cross the floor into the blind spot of anyone coming up or down the stairs. It sounds doable, even with the additional weight of the child. He does a quick sweep of the corridor first: the alcoves he’d scoped out earlier are placed roughly three doors apart, and if he doesn’t stray too far from them he’d be able to take cover in case someone arrived unexpectedly.

Kaneki takes a deep breath, and starts running.

He clears the floors with no trouble. On the second, he asks Hide to exclusively keep a lookout on the outside of the building where the visuals are more reliable, rather than half-assing it inside. Hide readily accepts. It was becoming obvious that backup hadn’t been called in time for them to surround Kaneki before he got out.

There’s a sleek black sedan parked two blocks across the road, and Kaneki follows Hide’s instructions and eases the little girl into the back seat. The driver stares straight ahead, giving no indication he’s registering what’s happening.

Kaneki takes one last, assessing look at the girl. She looks pale and worn, tired in that bone-deep way that comes from prolonged mental fatigue more than physical exertion. He blows out a breath.

“She’ll be fine,” Hide’s voice is low and firm in his ear. “I promise.”

Kaneki chuckles and steps away from the car, and it begins to pull out of the parking lot smooth as clockwork.

“I’m more worried about us,” he says easily. “I’m pretty sure you don’t have the authority to tweak the mission like that.”

Hide groans. The intensity doesn’t drop out of his voice, though now he sounds more relieved than anything. “Don’t remind me. Ugh, there’s going to be so much paperwork. Stop _laughing,_ me working my butt off is not funny.”

Kaneki doesn’t stop, because it really kind of is.

*

“Six to eight meters away, eight o’clock,” Hide says as soon as Kaneki picks up his phone. Kaneki tenses, but his gait remains perfectly even. “Two guys. Been following you for a while now, since you passed the Aqua building.”

Kaneki bites down on a curse. The street he’s on is busy at the best of times; now, with the office hours over, it’s crawling with civilians. Definitely a bad place for a confrontation.

“I’m gonna lose visuals if you keep going in that direction,” Hide says unhappily. “You’ll have to- oh. Right.”

Kaneki’s already slipping unobtrusively into a side alley and taking a few quick leaps up the side of a building, from the trash cans to a fire escape to the ledge of a window, and then along the sills from there along the backs of the buildings. Before he switches to the roofs, he balances on a jutting-out ledge of a window with his phone pressed to his ear. “Now?”

“Lost them,” Hide’s voice comes out raspy. He clears his throat, and Kaneki frowns.  “For now, I think. Shit, Kaneki, you never told me you knew parkour.”

Kaneki hums. He’s got one eye on the road, because a sloppy agent was a dead agent, but it’s fun to poke reactions out of Hide’s default cheer. When he’s off the job -like now- he catches himself thinking about the way Hide scratches his cheek with a fingernail when he’s uncertain, the dip of his head that he uses to hide his blush when Kaneki makes his flirtation a little overt.

“I have a lot of talents, Hide, I thought you knew that.”

Hide makes a little squeaky noise, making Kaneki chuckle into his phone. “Hm? You didn’t? Maybe I should show you sometime.”

“Ugh, and you call me tacky,” Hide complains, and Kaneki wonders if he’s making his voice sound breathy on purpose. “And anyway, you better come down now, it’s gonna be dangerous if you keep free running like a crazy person without a reason. Duck into the first shop you come to for a sec so I can- Shit.”

Kaneki walks into the shop calmly. It’s a bakery, the tables jammed full of people. His glance over the room is brief and thorough; two exits and a fire escape, and the layout provided nice cover if he managed to get the customers out before it became a shootout. “Yes?”

“Look casual, they haven’t spotted you yet,” Hide says. “They’re outside now. Buy something.”

Kaneki steps up to the cashier and rattles off a few items automatically, smiling softly when she makes a comment. He thanks her when she wishes him a good day, and begins walking out. “Now?”

“Oh yeah, they’re gone,” Hide says, sounding dismissive. “Hey, what’d you get?”

Kaneki blinks.

“Ooh no wait, I already got the surveillance from the supermarket parking lot on the other side of the road,” Hide says excitedly. “The shape of that box…you got us éclairs, didn’t you? Did you remember to get some for Touka-chan too?”

A muscle in Kaneki’s jaw jumps. “Hide,” he says very evenly. “Where are you now?”

“At Anteiku, like we promised!” Hide sings. “I didn’t order for you yet, since you’re running late. I really wanted something sweet, so it’s a good thing you picked my favorite!”

Kaneki thinks very seriously about crushing the phone in his fist. It seems just like the kind of melodramatic thing Hide would’ve liked him to do, though, so he resists. “So there were no men following me?”

“Nope.” Some slurping on the other end. “Coupla high school girls were looking at you like they wanted to ask why you looked like an old man, but I’m fairly sure they were harmless. Just stopping by for that karaoke place, it’s on their way home from school. Sounds fun,” he adds, wistful. It sounds doubly ridiculous to Kaneki, who can see him bouncing in his chair inside the shop, nearly upsetting his coffee twice. “One of them is failing Japanese, though, and the other one just quit baseball club.”

Kaneki rolls his eyes. _What a show-off._ “So all of this is because you can tell any girls’ school by their uniform?”

“Yup.”Hide is now glancing at the door, like he somehow knows Kaneki’s already here, despite Kaneki standing in a blind spot. “C’mon man, hurry up, Touka-chan looks like she wants to throw those pretty china cups at my head.”

“Good,” Kaneki whispers, right into his ear.

Hide doesn’t jump, or upset his cup over his precious laptop, which is a pity. Kaneki is halfway disappointed -maybe Hide’s instincts were sharper than he’d calculated, and he could tell Kaneki was in the shop?- but then, he sees how red the tips of Hide’s ears have gone. At his sides, his hands are gripping the chair very tightly.

_Ah._

Kaneki bites back his smile to peer at Hide’s face, and is awarded a second’s glimpse of Hide’s red cheeks and slightly parted lips before he jerks his head away. “Shut up, don’t look at me,” Hide mumbles.

“I didn’t say anything,” Kaneki says mildly, fascinated by the way Hide’s blush dips low, lower, right across those pretty collarbones. _Harmless flirting,_ he thinks firmly, so that he won’t want to lick the ridges anymore, find out what Hide’s neck tastes like. _Admiring from afar._

Hide groans. He darts a little glance at Kaneki, accidentally meets his gaze and blushes harder. “You’re really unfair.”

“I’ve been told,” acknowledges Kaneki.

Touka comes over then to make disapproving faces at both of them and pretend to have forgotten Kaneki’s order. Kaneki laments this with a sigh; this is familiar ground, letting Hide find his footing again easily. No more flustered accusations or blushing cheeks. It’s all very unfair.

Kaneki passes over his box of sweets as a peace offering and watches Hide go into raptures over it. Kaneki’s lost count of how many times he’s wondered what someone like Hide was doing in the CCG. Kaneki hasn’t had very many handlers before, but they tended to follow the same pattern: brisk, impersonal, wound tightly as if they would leak all their secrets if they spoke more than two words at a time. They’re all a collection of ghosts, flitting about in the underworld living their grey lives. Hide’s very good at what he does, but that doesn’t change the fact that he -with his warmth, his open personality, and that core of unyielding kindness- sticks out like a sore thumb.

“Hide,” Kaneki says, cutting him off mid-sentence by accident. “What happened to the girl?”

Hide’s eyes flick all over the room, once, before landing back on Kaneki. His smile smoothes itself out into a neutral line. _What an expressive face._ “Superiors told me they were taking care of it, but I stuck my nose in a little.” He pauses. “They weren’t lying. She’s been sent to the Academy, they take good care of orphans there.” Hide smiles a little at Kaneki. “I should know.”

 _Oh._ So that, at least, answers the question of how Hide wound up working for the CCG. Kaneki’s heard the rumors about the CCG takes in orphans with potential from around the country and trains them up as recruits- it’s how it stays on the top. The Bureau itself is an efficient, tight-knit group of highly-qualified agents who all graduated at the top of their classes from the Academy. Organizations like Aogiri do pop up from time to time, but all criminal activity is stomped ruthlessly and efficiently without exception. It’s what they’re in the process of doing even now.

Kaneki hears all sorts of things about the CCG’s methods -that they were advancing from law enforcement to a major political influence in the whole country, for one- but it’s none of his business. He turns back to Hide. “Find out how she got there in the first place?”

Hide frowns. His fingers flex, a tic for when he wants to pull out something on his laptop but can’t. “Definitely Aogiri. Everyone in charge of questioning her seem to unanimously agree that some of the people she describes were top execs. Naki’s pretty damn unmistakable, now that Yamori’s gone.”

Kaneki keeps looking at him, but he’s aware that he’s disconnected, on some level. Usually hearing that name makes him revert to full autopilot while he listens to centipedes writhing in his ear, that _crack-crack_ of knuckles, the snap of bones; today, he realizes that he can still hear Hide’s voice.

Hide leans forward. “Kaneki, you okay?”

 _Stupid, careless._ No one has caught him out when he was like this. He smiles his soft smile and touches his cheek, disorientated. “I’m fine.”

“’Kay,” Hide leans back. He’s still _looking_ at Kaneki, and Kaneki knows he’s drawing his own set of conclusions, but all he can think is: _they went quiet._

The voices in his head -Yamori, with his scalpel, and cruel, beautiful Rize-san- go quiet when Hide’s near. They can’t make themselves heard over someone who commands all of Kaneki’s attention like a powerful lamp turned on his thoughts; they become shadows on the wall, fleeing from the sun.

 _Shit,_ Kaneki thinks. He’s smiling now, for real, he can’t help it. _This is bad._

“Oi Kaneki, what’s so funny?” Hide says complainingly. He’s smiling back, though, because he _likes_ Kaneki, for whatever incomprehensible reason. “You’re not even listening, are-”

Kaneki leans over the table, and kisses him.

It’s…chaste, which isn’t how Kaneki imagined their first kiss would go. Tongue-fucking Hide in public, though sorely tempting, is out of the question, so after the first press of lips he peppers little kisses on Hide’s upturned mouth, tasting chocolate and cream and basking in the warmth of it. Hide starts to respond after a beat of frozen surprise; grinning, he pulls Kaneki a little closer, kisses him a little deeper, so that when Touka comes and yanks him off, Kaneki can still feel the buzzing heat of it lingering on his lips.

“So,” says their waitress, Kaneki’s mentor, scowling at them both equally. “Guess I should tell Yoshimura-san not to worry about the two of you not getting along.”

She slams Kaneki’s coffee cup in front of him, miraculously managing not to spill a drop.

Hide looks up at her. “I thought every agent got it on with their handler?” he asks innocently, and Kaneki snorts. “That’s what they taught us at Spying 101.”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Touka hisses. Kaneki and Hide deliberately avoid each other’s eye, not wanting to get maimed for laughing. “You’re both such dicks, ugh. Never should’ve let you get a partner.”

She and Kaneki make faces at each other like angry toddlers, but Hide tilts his head. “About that. Don’t independent groups like you guys usually come in teams?”

“We would, except this _jerk_ can’t work with anyone else,” Touka grumbles, and Kaneki rolls his eyes, and mutters _here we go again._ It’s drowned by Touka saying, “We’ve had some of the best handlers working with us, real pros, but Mr. Violence-is-Always-the-Answer over here can’t take orders for shit.”

“But they’re not orders,” Hide says with evident surprise. “Our job is to scope out the optimum plans given the data at hand, but ultimately, it’s the agent who makes the call. Spying 101, man.”

Touka and Kaneki blink at him. “So you just… _trust_ him blindly?” Touka shakes her head. “I can’t tell if you’re just really green or way overconfident.”

“It’s not like that,” Hide argues back, and Kaneki’s heart _swells,_ which is probably dangerous and unhealthy but it seriously feels like the sun is shining full on his face. “Professional confidence and mutual trust is what builds a partnership, right? I _know_ he’s damn good, the best, so I try my hardest too, so that way we’re unstoppable.”

Touka sticks her tongue out. “Gross,” she says, but the fact that she’s not kicking anyone’s head in means she likes what Hide just said. She sashays past Kaneki back to the counter, patting his shoulder on the way. Kaneki supposes he must have looked like a total loser, blushing at Hide like that.

He’s…overwhelmed. It’s not a bad feeling.

After they finish their coffee, Hide suggests going to the park to harass the ducks. Along the way, and after they find a fairly secluded bench, it’s mostly Hide that talks. Hide’s got a formidable talent for chattering about the inane, but today, something’s been dislodged; he talks -hesitantly- about his past, growing up in the cut-throat atmosphere of the Academy, how only the kids with perfect grades got acknowledged. The suicide rate that Hide mentions offhandedly makes Kaneki gape at him, deeply shocked. Logically, it meant that more than half of the kids who grew up with Hide were already dead by the time he graduated.

“And the rest?” Kaneki asks, because Hide sounding so matter-of-fact about a childhood like that makes something in his chest hurt. “You were top of the class, so you graduated and joined the CCG, and the survivors?”

Hide shrugs one shoulder. He’s gazing off into the distance, his hands folded in his lap. “No idea, man,” he pushes a smile towards Kaneki. “I mean, I was told that they were supposed to retake the exams, but at least one of them should be working with us by now. It’s been four years.”

When Kaneki narrows his eyes, Hide waves his hands about dismissively. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m sure they’re working boring desk jobs somewhere! I’m just mouthing off because I kinda miss them.”

Kaneki pulls him in for a kiss, deeper this time. Hide melts right into his arms, and fits against him with a small sound, and Kaneki feels him shudder when he strokes his thumb along Hide’s cheekbone. They kiss and kiss and kiss, until Hide is making soft breathy noises and Kaneki shifts him so he’s practically sitting on his lap.

It’s harder to break away this time, and all of Kaneki’s nerves feel raw and electrified. He knocks his forehead against Hide’s with a groan, and Hide chuckles breathlessly.

“Tell me about you as a kid,” Kaneki murmurs to Hide.

“Skinny. Small. Hyperactive as fuck,” Hide says with a laugh. “Never got bullied, though, because smart people don’t get bullied in the CCG no matter how scrawny they are. Never had many friends, either.”

Kaneki hums. He thinks about Hide, awkwardly growing into his own intuition and intelligence, unsure about everything, when the fire was still a spark. His heart thrums again.

“I did get called a teacher’s pet, though, because those days Amon-san was doing some lectures, and I used to hang around him all the time,” Hide admits. His fingers tangle with Kaneki’s. “I kinda grew on him as well, I guess. He took me out for ramen the day I graduated, and told me he was proud of me.”

He flicks a glance at Kaneki, mischievous. Kaneki quirks an eyebrow. “Hm?”

“Nah, just thinking that he’s probably stronger than you.”

“Probably not,” Kaneki counters comfortably.

“Aw, don’t be jealous,” Hide sings, and Kaneki groans. “Though you’ve got good reason to be. Amon-san’s the coolest of the cool. Super-cool. Even his name. I think it’s the name of an ancient fire god, so cool.”

Kaneki almost tells him that it’s actually the Egyptian god of the gods, but realizes that he’d just be proving Hide’s point for him. He sulks.

“Speaking of Amon-san,” Hide says abruptly.

Kaneki looks at him, and he looks restless, like he’s going to to say what’s been on his mind the whole evening. That’s another thing about him that draws Kaneki; Hide doesn’t see the point of hiding things, and when he wants to be, he can be recklessly direct.

“Yeah?”

Hide bites his lip, and looks away. His jaw is clenched. Kaneki waits patiently.

“He actually called me this week to talk about that last assignment,” Hide says finally. Weighing his words, so that only the relevant data will reach Kaneki. “With the little girl. Turns out it’s not the first time we’ve raided Aogiri and rescued kids, all around seven or eight years old. And they’re all…fuck.”

Kaneki nudges him, gentle, unobtrusive. “What?”

Hide takes a deep breath. He’s gone very pale, and his hands are shaking a little.  An icy fingertip of fear keeps running along Kaneki’s spine. It takes a lot to rattle Hide.

“Apparently there’s something wrong with their DNA,” he says quietly. “They’ve been genetically modified to…well, do _something_ , they’re not sure what, but the procedure’s probably very risky with a high death count. For one, the mutation would have to happen while they were still fetal, which means Aogiri’s going around jamming nearly-lethal syringes in expecting mothers out there.”

Kaneki processes this. His hand tightens around Hide’s.

“That’s horrible,” he says.

Hide leans into him. His hair tickles Kaneki’s chin, and he brings their joined hands up to inspect them. “Bad things shouldn’t happen to kids,” he says. His voice is clear and strong, and Kaneki senses that this is one of the convictions that drives Hide, one of the tenets of his life.

Kaneki draws him closer. He’d thought his heart was a black hole, but everything Hide does just makes him fall deeper in love. Perhaps it was inevitable. With Hide’s head pressing against the inside of his arm, it really does feel that way.

“Yeah,” Kaneki says.

*

“I’m thinking about getting a potted plant,” Hide says some three weeks later, as Kaneki methodically sweeps the sixth bland office room in the building. There’s someone coming after him; there almost always is, but Kaneki’s not going to worry too much about that. At this point his instinct and Hide’s lookout have become something of an art form, and there aren’t many people in the world who can slip past them unnoticed. And those people very notably aren’t anywhere near this job.

They’re not far from home- after the last mission where Kaneki got thrown off of and subsequently blew up a ship, the CCG has been slightly cautious about letting him cause international incidents that can be traced back to them. Hence: monotonous jobs in and around the city, too low-profile to get him noticed.

“Hm,” Kaneki says in response to Hide’s announcement. He’s not averse to how things are going; quiet means more missions where he’s not scrambling to get away from men with guns or disarming and killing men with guns. It means Hide flirting more and more through the connection, so that once Kaneki finally sees him again all he can think about is kissing him breathless and later, taking Hide apart in his bedroom as he stares up at Kaneki with hungry dark eyes, arching into his touch.

“One of those rubber things they have in supermarkets,” Hide continues, oblivious to where Kaneki’s mind is wandering. “Like, are they even real? I can’t tell. They’re really ugly, but that’s what makes them cute. Hey, Cottonbud, would you mind if I named one after you?”

“Are you insinuating something, Caramel?”

“Ugh, who am I kidding, you’re totally a cactus,” Hide groans theatrically. “Prickly and pretty. Maybe I’ll get an albino one. Are albino cacti a thing, do you think?”

“Google it sometime,” Kaneki says, amused. He sets the dialer on the vault and waits for it to adjust the settings on the series of locks, after which it overrides the signal so that the system doesn’t register it’s been broken into. Then it beeps and the door clicks open, revealing the pile of folders inside.

He registers it instantly, but it still takes him a few microseconds to react: a quality to the air more than a definite smell. His hand brushes the walls of the safe and he feels the nozzle attached to a thin glass container.

“I’m very proud of that one,” says a voice.

This wasn’t in the detail but he _should have seen it coming._ Kaneki feels a foreign light headedness wash over him, even as he covers his nose and plucks the bottle out of its holder and tries to turn around.

“Huh,” he says to the voice. “Maybe I should break this thing, let the rest out.”

He can feel the poison, and it’s excruciating- it’s stimulating every nerve, sending pain signals endlessly. He can hear Hide’s voice, close and far at the same time and he fights to listen: _Cottonbud what is it, what’s going on? Cottonbud, I- who the hell is that? Fuck, no one’s supposed to be in here, **Cottonbud are you okay.**_

“I don’t think so,” sings the voice, hideously distorted compared to Hide’s. Now that Kaneki has mostly twisted his body around, he can make out the shape of him- short and stocky, his face a monstrous black blur. _Gasmask_.

“But I’ve gotta say, you must be resilient as fuck to still be conscious,” says Gasmask, in his throaty voice. “That little beauty’s taken out men built like bulls, five times bigger than you. I’m impressed.”

Fingers pry the little shard of glass away from his nerveless fingers, and Kaneki can’t even twitch in his direction. His mind hangs on; the best part about him, Yamori used to say, was how he wouldn’t snap even after he got past the four hundreds.

The haze that comes with the pain makes Yamori crack his knuckles in his head. He’d used poison, too- small, experimental doses before he set his scalpel on Kaneki’s skin, gently twisted his shoulder out of its socket. _Brilliant,_ he had roared, over the background noise of Kaneki’s screams. _All of that, and you still can do it. As expected of Rize’s protégé!_

_Four hundred and sixty eight minus seven is?_

A fourteen year old Kaneki sobs: _I don’t know. I don’t know, make it stop. Somebody help me. Make it stop make it stop make it-_

Rize-san laughs, joyful and loving. She’s been dead for so many years but she’ll never leave Kaneki- _what a bad mother that would make me, Ken-kun._ Rize-san didn’t believe in poison. She believed in nothing but brute force, so that even when Kaneki is at his frailest, he would succeed. Growing up with her had made him strong. Killing all those people for her had made him numb. No wonder he was so good at withstanding torture.

The man is saying something, but Kaneki’s mind has already scrambled up the details, so that nothing but the pain seems real. Poison, Yamori, Rize-san: the pain connects them, ties them to Kaneki.

Maybe it takes hours. Maybe he falls unconscious, but that seems kind. Every blink of pain has the promise of more looming over it. He’s aware that he’s forgetting something important. But what could possibly be-

_Hide._

Hide needs him. He needs to get to Hide and tell him-

“I’m not a crack shot like my agent, but even I can put a bullet through your head at this distance. Now tell me: which of these is it?”

_No._

“You _shot me in the stomach,”_ another, incredulous voice, somehow strained. Gasmask.

“I was aiming for your leg,” Hide says, rock-steady. _Why is he here, what is he doing? He’s going to get killed._ Hide absolutely cannot die. Hide can’t. “God knows what you’ll have to go through before I finally get your head, but at least you can’t run away like this. Now, tell me. Which of these is the antidote?”

“Where did you get-”

His indignation is cut off by the sound of a gunshot, then a scream.

“Which.” A clinking sound accompanies the words. Distantly, Kaneki recognizes this: Hide’s not giving an inch, cutting off any paths of escape. There’s a quality to his voice that Kaneki’s only heard once before -when he said, _bad things shouldn’t happen to kids-_ but it’s stronger now, pure steel where there was only the suggestion of strength.

“ _Why are you doing this?_ You’re a fucking case officer!” Footsteps. “I don’t- _aaaaah!”_

The sound of a foot connecting with his stomach is unmistakable. “I got these from your little lab, they were labeled and everything,” Hide says, almost conversationally. He kicks again, tearing another scream from the man. “It’s one of them for sure, so I guess I’ll just have to keep beating you up till you give me straight answers. Now tell me which one the antidote to the poison in the vault is.”

“No no, not again, _please,”_ the man sobs, spluttering and coughing. The coughs sound wet. Hide must have knocked his gasmask off as well, because he sounds like any scared human being. Kaneki’s too sick to be anything but grateful that he doesn’t sound like Yamori anymore. “Please, I’ll tell you, just don’t- It’s the one in your right hand. The se-second one. Don’t- please-”

“Are you lying?”

“I swear to God, I’m not…please believe me!” Another hoarse scream. “Stop! Please, it’s the right one, I swear!”

The man breaks off into wet sobbing and moans, and Kaneki’s too out of it to focus on anything other than sound. Rize-san isn’t squeezing his heart in her blood-red nails anymore: even when he’s this weak, she’s just a distant brooding figure in his mind.

“You make Rize-san go quiet,” Kaneki whispers to the empty air.

The air answers: “Rize-san?”

Hide’s voice is shaking dangerously. His pretty brown eyes make it into Kaneki’s tunneled vision, and Kaneki has to blink a couple of times to recognize what he’s seeing. There’s almost too much love in Hide’s eyes for him to comprehend. Hide _loves_ him, loves him so much he refused to leave Kaneki here to die and risked his life to come here and get him. Loves him enough to let his core of lightning and fire show and raze everything stranding in his way.

Kaneki smiles softly. _Hide’s insane._ The thought is tired and familiar, full of aching warmth.

“She’s my adoptive mother,” Kaneki says, even as Hide turns his arm towards him. Something grazes his arm. “She doesn’t like it when I’m weak. But you make her go quiet.”

“I love you,” Hide says in a raw voice. His hands are shaking, and Kaneki can hear the used syringe clatter to the floor. “I love you so much, _god,_ Kaneki, I thought-”

“You came,” Kaneki says. The darkness is wrapping all around his limbs, but he doesn’t sense death anymore. He’s not dying anymore. “You came for me. You saved me. I love you.”

Hide kisses him, quick and desperate. “I always will,” he says fervently. “Every time.”

Kaneki smiles, and lets go.

*

He spends two weeks resting, and most of those two weeks is spent in Hide’s homey apartment. Hide had completed the mission and holed both of them up until backup came through, after which he apparently wrote his report without sleeping, eating, or showing any signs that he was actually human. Kaneki can picture it easily: Hide gets a certain way when he’s worried, and it’s like he forgets he’s a person too.

Those two weeks are filled with sunlight. Hide tries to get out of bed every morning and Kaneki reaches after him, fingers lingering on the creamy expanse of Hide’s back. They make out for hours, Hide straddling Kaneki’s hips and rocking against him gently, none of it going anywhere. It’s almost noon when they do make it out, and Hide makes Kaneki carry him everywhere.

The day’s spent reading on the couch with Hide on the floor between his knees, swearing at his laptop occasionally. Kaneki peers at his screen a handful of times; sometimes he’s coding, and sometimes he’s playing first-person shoot-‘em-ups with great enthusiasm, his headphones leaking little squeaks of violence.

They cook, which is unsettlingly pleasant. Hide crows in delight when he realizes that Kaneki’s range of expertise stretches to the kitchen, and he makes strange requests that Kaneki shoots down immediately. Hide insists on helping, so Kaneki sets him on the task of chopping. They touch, frequently and with no good reason- Hide touches his hand now and again, gentle and barely-there, and Kaneki finds that wrapping his arms around Hide’s waist is the best feeling in the world.

At the end of the day Hide leans over him, eyes catching the light of the dimmed lamps. He stares at Kaneki for so long his arms give out and he has to sit with a knee planted on either side of Kaneki’s hips, but he goes on looking, and Kaneki looks back, because Hide’s alive, and Hide’s here, and Hide’s expression says that he loves Kaneki so much he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Finally, one of them relents with a sigh, and reaches for the other. Kisses can go either way: long and languid, or burningly messy, tongues everywhere. It ends with them both shuddering apart, and Kaneki being more aware of it than ever: _this was the happiest he’d ever been._

At the end of the two weeks, they’re both summoned to the CCG.

Hide explains that it’s routine, something that happens to every agent who gets injured in the line of duty and takes some time off. He touches his face a few times as he says it, though, so Kaneki knows that he’s feeling uneasy about something.

In honor of meeting their superiors, they dress up: this is apparently a given in Hide’s book. Kaneki’s glad, because he gets to see Hide in a suit, and Hide looks _adorably_ awkward in a suit. He’s too scrawny for it, and he’s visibly put-off by how black and boring it is. He seems a big fan of Kaneki’s, though: he pulls Kaneki in by the tie and kisses him for long blissful minutes before they leave, grinning happily by the end of it, like he got away with doing something awesome.

The CCG gave him a pass with no name on it when he first got the contract, and he gets to use it now: it gives him all the clearance necessary, along with his retinal scan on a chip. _Pretty cool, huh,_ suggest Hide’s waggling eyebrows, and Kaneki rolls his eyes.

“Pretty basic,” Kaneki corrects, once they’re in a room together. “All the security practices seem a little lax.”

Hide places a mock-condescending hand on his shoulder. “Ah, but you’ve never had to come in here the normal way, VIP-san. The CCG is dying to arrest someone, and it might as well be some poor bastard who gave his blood type wrong in the forms. I’ve heard there’s an IQ test at the main entrance, and that Arima-san personally grades them all.”

His suit, Kaneki notices, is hopelessly wrinkled already. It’s all the fidgeting. Hide’s really bad at killing time once he’s away from his tech -which Kaneki found out some seven months ago in one of their earlier missions- and it’s his clothes that primarily suffer. Kaneki watches him in amusement as Hide practically bounces along the walls with a mixture of nervousness and boredom, darting little glances at Kaneki and quickly looking away when he realizes he’s been caught. All the while, his fingers tap-tap-tap away on his leg restlessly.

It’s a real shame when a door opens and a man walks in. He’s _huge;_ Kaneki puts him at somewhere close to 190 centimeters, with a shoulder span that looks almost menacing in the black suit he’s wearing. The way he moves and carries himself all scream military; so this was one of the Academy’s infamous agent class graduates. Kaneki automatically calculates his chances; without considering any outside elements, he can take this man.

His instinctive wariness is eased when he looks at Hide. Anyone who makes Hide light up like that can’t possibly be an enemy.

“Amon-san!” Hide cries, breaking the stalemate in the loudest possible manner. They both wince. “How was the mission? How’s Akira-san? And Kaneki, say hi!”

“Good afternoon,” says Amon, with great dignity.

“Hi,” Kaneki deadpans.

Amon’s gaze turns softer when he looks at Hide. “It’s good to see you doing well, Nagachika. And thank you, both I and Akira are in good health. We expect to weed out the root of the terrorist scum very shortly.” He flicks his gaze over to Kaneki, who keeps his face as smooth as marble. “That has to do with what you were summoned here for.”

Kaneki nods.

“But before that, let me formally introduce myself. I’m Amon Koutarou, First Class.”

Kaneki nods again. “Kaneki.”

Amon gestures for them both to sit back down, and takes a seat himself. “As the country’s foremost establishment for espionage and counter-espionage, it’s the CCG’s duty to expunge any sources that threaten the peace on a national or international level. And right now, our primary concern is a group calling itself Aogiri Tree. It’s mostly comprised of ex-agents from intelligence agencies all around the world who have been dishonorably discharged on a variety of reasons. They seem to hold a grudge against this government in particular, and hope to overthrow it by forcing the Prime Minister to resign, and then building it anew by orienting it around itself.”

Kaneki raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t comment.

“They’re unusually well-organized and well-funded, which is how they’ve managed to stay afloat for so long. Their strength is too formidable and unknown for us to launch an all-out attack. At this point, we’ve lost upwards of ten agents to them.” Amon clears his throat. His eyes are dark and intent on Kaneki’s. “Put simply, they are looking to bring about the destruction of all that we know, and have the means to do it.

“And now there are reports of them planning something bigger- something beyond the petty acts of terrorism they’ve been responsible for thus far.” Amon breaks eye contact with Kaneki to look at Hide, and his expression can’t be described as anything other than _concerned._ Kaneki’s tilts his head.

“They’ve been recruiting children,” Amon says, and Kaneki watches Hide’s intent expression falter. A crease appears on his forehead, and he looks viscerally _unhappy,_ making something go hard inside Kaneki’s chest. “Not as mere soldiers, but as test subjects of sorts. We have five of them in custody, and the ones who don’t have severely modified genes are showing signs of mental imbalance. None of them have very long to live.

“However, quite recently on a field mission, there emerged information on a certain high-ranking member of Aogiri that we believe could lead to the dismantling of their organizational structure.”

Kaneki says, “Ah.”

Amon nods at them both. “Nagachika will remain your primary contact point. Your goal is to bring in the Aogiri member alive, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

He pauses, as if debating internally about something. Finally, he rests his hand on Hide’s head.

Kaneki tenses, half-twitches towards the knife nestled against his ankle.

But Amon’s ruffling Hide’s hair in jerky motions, clearly uncomfortable but determined. “You’re doing very well with your first professional, Nagachika,” he says, and Hide’s dull, unhappy eyes grow as wide as saucers. Kaneki relaxes. “I’m very proud.”

Hide blushes so hard it’s a little alarming. Kaneki smirks.

“Thanks, Amon-san,” Hide says in a wobbly voice, and Kaneki feels his heart overflow with fondness. “Means a lot.”

"Ah, and your request," Amon says hurriedly, reaching inside his coat. Kaneki doesn't miss a beat doing the same, his fingers grazing and closing around the metal of his automatic. The gun Amon draws out comes with a separate case of bullets; Kaneki doesn't loosen his grip on his own until it's safely on the desk, away from all three of them. 

"It's a mandatory upgrade," Hide explains, picking it up and examining the chamber. He carefully keeps it pointed towards a blank spot in the wall, and the tenseness in the air gradually diffuses. Hide is kind of amazing. "But I have shit aim, so I don't really think I'll be using this anytime soon."

Amon and Kaneki make identical faces. 

"Nagachika," says Amon. 

"Hide," says Kaneki, "shut up."

Hide looks up in surprise, and then grins, sharp and bright like a cat. "Is this about tempting fate? You're both so paranoid, jeez."

Amon ruffles his hair again, probably to shut him up. It works; Hide starts blushing again, and Kaneki doesn't think he'll ever let Hide live down his giant fucking crush on his superior. It's so weird, and sweet: thus, Hide all over. 

After Amon’s gone, Kaneki keeps smirking at Hide.

“Oh, shut up and read your file,” Hide grumbles. His cheeks are still a little red.

“Yes sir,” Kaneki murmurs, and laughing, catches the pen Hide throws at his head.

*

In the mid-afternoon of the 25th of February, the Aogiri executive codenamed Black Rabbit checks into a hotel in Sakhalin under the name Kusakabe Ryousuke. Two hours before the flight scheduled to take him to the next in his series of temporary bolt holes -this one in Guangdong- departs, an official in a suit asks him for his passport in the lobby in flawless Russian. The Black Rabbit assumes the man is part of the Russian police and reaches warily for the pocket in his jacket.

Two seconds later, his arms are in a vice grip, his feet leave the ground, and a cool, practiced finger searches out and presses the nerve point under his ear, and he goes out like a light. The official slings his arm around his own shoulders, murmurs a reprimand loud enough to be overheard about drinking too much, and takes him up to the booked room.

“Estimated two hours before shit hits the fan,” says Hide tersely, even as Kaneki lays out the Black Rabbit on the unruffled sheets of the bed. “The probability of him working alone isn’t quite one hundred per cent, but this could be the only chance we get so we’ll have to pretend freak deviations don’t happen.”

“They don’t in movies,” Kaneki says, crossing the room towards the desk and powers up the laptop sitting on it. “I thought that was the extent of your training in nerd school.”

“Well, they sure as hell didn’t teach us how to sound like a Russian porn star.” Hide sounds petulant. Kaneki bets he’s blushing. “Seriously, Cottonbud. Next time you come over you’re only talking to me in sexy foreign languages. Go big or go- oh, it’s done,” he says, even as Kaneki sets up the program Hide gave him to get into the computer.

Kaneki hums. “So it is.”

 Hide makes a noise. “Get to _work._ Remember I’m not gonna be able to bust you out of the network if they find you out. You’re on your own, buddy.”

It’s actually more that they’ve been ordered to keep the operation as covert as possible, and Hide strong-arming his way into Aogiri’s communications network wouldn’t qualify as such. And like he’d said, it was rare enough that they had a lead on the location of someone so high up the pecking order in Aogiri, it would be waste to not squeeze out every scrap of intelligence they could get.

Standard hard drive copying isn’t so big of a deal, though. Kaneki snoops around while the process is running -trusting Hide to keep him informed of physical intruders- and is pleasantly surprised by the lengths Black Rabbit seems to have gone for security. Young he may be, but he was painstakingly efficient.

It’s this efficiency that helps Kaneki find what he’s looking for so easily. A virtual drive, mounted with an unobtrusive set of letters that could mean anything as the disk name. Kaneki glances at his watch. It’s heavily encrypted, and he’s ill-equipped to make anything of it now.

He reaches for the second flash drive, the spare.

“Cleaning staff,” Hide murmurs. “They won’t disturb your room, but just so you know, they’ll be outside in three minutes.” Then: “Cottonbud, anything wrong?”

“Did you seriously include decryption software in the old flash drive?” Kaneki says incredulously, running his eyes over the list of programs. He quickly begins decrypting the virtual drive, and Hide laughs sheepishly.

“How’s it going? My visuals for inside the room are pretty shit, but I have a good angle on the windows and door, so you’ve only gotta watch out for the ceiling.”

“How many terrible spy movies have you watched?” Kaneki complains. “The _ceiling?”_

“Ha, shows what you know, Captain I Only Read Dark Artsy Books,” Hide counters. “It was a _samurai_ film.”

“Hm,” Kaneki mumbles, distractedly. He scrolls back up to the block of text that caught his eye: _Magnetic stimulation caused a major change in the schema of the test results of 7 out of 11 subjects. This success rate exceeds similar tests for a test group of those aged 15-18 years by 89 per cent (see: x). Further testing required for conclusive proof, but hypothesis that inhibiting the LATL with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for enhancing brain activity (rTMS; Kanou_ et al _._ _2003_ _,_ _2006_ _) is most effective on subjects aged 5-8 years may be maintained._

Inhibiting the… Kaneki frowns, scrolls further up. LATL stands for the left anterior temporal lobe, responsible for semantic memory. The doctors carrying out the study seem to believe that interfering with it enhances cognitive abilities somehow. It reminds Kaneki of what Amon said- that Aogiri were planning on molding an army of elite, high-functioning child soldiers to spread their ideals.

He reserves judgment, and starts to close it down, when two phrases catch his eye at the same time: _increased intracranial pressure leading to brain tumors, four to five years after initial testing_ and _supply of subjects from Cochlea._

His eyes widen. The first thing he thinks is: _this is going to break Hide’s heart._

“Cottonbud?” Hide barks urgently. His instincts really are something else. “Cottonbud, what’s wrong.”

“Caramel, please stay on task,” Kaneki says. His voice sounds perfectly normal, a little bored, almost contemptuous. Hide probably sees through it. “Can’t have samurais attacking me from the ceiling.”

The cursor hovers over the word Cochlea. It’s a link.

A sensation of absolute calm washes over Kaneki. _It’s just a job,_ he tells himself. _A pro leaves no holes in his work. A sloppy agent is a dead agent._

He clicks. For a second, nothing happens. Kaneki knows it’s coming, though. He stays alert.

What opens up is a message box, indicating that someone is typing on the other side.

“Cottonbud I’m _really_ freaking out here,” Hide says in a low voice. “Is it their system? Want me to bust you out?”

“Calm down, Caramel,” Kaneki tells him. “I’m finishing up now.”

As he speaks, the message finally shows itself. Kaneki inhales cleanly through his nose.

 **Hey kid! Looks like you ask the right questions, unlike those stuuupid doves that sent you here (** **ノ＞▽＜。)** **ノ**

He types into the text box: _have you infiltrated the CCG_

 **Haha! You’re funny, kid!** (°∀°)b **But do you know the story about Pandora’s Box? It’s about asking one question and getting the answers to too many things.**

_Where can I find the answers to my right questions then_

Kaneki waits, tap-tapping his knuckles on the desk. He’s being too casual; Hide’s probably flipped out by now. He listens and…there. Hide’s definitely in a car, probably the one they were bringing to transport the Black Rabbit back to HQ. He has maybe six minutes to before he got here, and after that the opportunity would be gone forever. He stares at the Black Rabbit's prone form for a handful of seconds. The possibility nudges at him, ignited by the persistent thought,  _this is going to break Hide's heart._

 **You know where** (ღ˘⌣˘ღ) ♫･*:.｡. .｡.:*･

He makes his decisions quick, clean, like stripping off a bandage. He’s pocketed his flash drive, wiped all traces of his activity on the computer and gathered his hostage up when the final message _ping!_ s cheerfully on the speakers. 

 **I’ll be waiting** (((o(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)o)))


	2. Chapter 2

There’s a man waiting for him at Haneda Airport, just as he thought there would be. He’s young, with a scar running down the length of the left side of his face, but what Kaneki senses from him is heavy training with not much by way of experience. He’s speaking urgently on the phone when Kaneki first spots him; almost two full minutes pass before he steps into Kaneki’s immediate field of vision and asks him to confirm his identity. The kid nods and leads him to a car, his movements jerky and nervous. Kaneki dampens his aura a little. The way the newbie’s breaths are coming out small and shallow, like he’s trying to lessen his presence and hide from Kaneki somehow, is the sort of thing he used to find amusing.

The café he’s driven to is called :re, but Anteiku makes itself immediately apparent. The mahogany-and-light theme seems to have struck Touka enough to recreate it after the old shop was destroyed, only now -and Kaneki notes this with a flicker of what could be actual amusement- with bunny motifs sprinkled liberally throughout.

He seats himself at one of the empty tables of the closed shop and waits. He doesn’t have to wait long. He knows she’s coming, and when she does, it’s with the soft fragrance of roses carried by the wind.

Touka sets his coffee down on the table and settles into the other chair.

Kaneki doesn’t bother pretending not to track the changes of the past three years. The whole journey, he’d been strictly reactionary, booking the flight, getting here. Touka deserves more than that. Touka deserves actual interest, and Kaneki digs deep enough to find some.

Her hair’s longer, and flutters about her neck as she moves. She’s traded in the cute outfits of shorts and jackets in pastel colors for dresses that reach her knees, knowingly, calmly feminine. At twenty she had been lovely, a pretty girl who could turn heads as she passed by. Now, at twenty-four, she is devastatingly beautiful, the steel of her polished and gleaming.

Kaneki raises his eyes to hers, and she nods. “Been a while.”

“It’s good to see you, Touka-chan,” he says.

Outside, in the grey world separate from theirs, a stupid-looking man is walking an ugly dog. The clanking cars are all driven by people with no faces. It’s a world full of hideous things, separated by the glass windows of the shop. In contrast, Touka -now turning her cup around on its saucer- seems almost unrealistically alluring.

Two worlds- and he belongs in neither. It hadn’t mattered so much in sleepy Kyushu, but in Tokyo it’s like an open-handed slap to the face.

He takes the cup in his hands and relishes in the burn.

“After I stopped being out there,” he says, and means, _after a psychopath with a grudge against Rize-san kidnapped me from my normal life and tortured me into this one,_ “I was pretty much resigned to never belonging in one place again, here, or there.”

Touka nods. There’s something shatteringly calm about her, like all the volatile aggressiveness she had to burn through in her lifetime had already been spent. She looks older, but Kaneki privately thinks that age suits her; that she’s prettier when she’s shed that thorny overcoat of bitterness and rage.

 “So I fixed myself as best I could and pushed on. Rize-san died before I got into high school, and that felt like an omen to me. A good one. A sign of things changing, of getting better.” He looks back down at his coffee. “Of course I knew that I was never really out there, I was only pretending. Yamori made me accept that. But I didn’t want anything to do with this world, either. Other than Rize-san’s legacy, there was nothing for me here. And that wasn’t something I wanted.”

There had been no love lost between Kaneki and Touka when he first joined Anteiku, straight out of Yamori’s basement, but now he thinks that she’s the one he missed the most.

“Hopeless as I was,” he continues quietly, “Hide saw something in me.”

At the mention of the name, her fingers twitch around her cup.

“I’ve been trying to find what he saw,” Kaneki says. “I’ve looked and looked, but all I’ve found is more proof of how useless I am. But Hide was smart, and he knew me better than anyone. And he loved me. He made sure that that was the one thing I would never doubt: that I was loved.”

Touka’s teeth dig into her lower lip. “Shitty Kaneki,” she whispers, voice trembling. “Idiot Kaneki. You’ve always been so selfish.”

“Let me go, Touka-chan,” he tells her, as gently as he can. “Let me go to his funeral. Let me say goodbye.”

Her shoulders shake, and her fingertips go white, now digging into the wood of the table. Kaneki feels no sympathy; instead he feels a detached kind of sadness, connected to both Touka as she is now and the way she used to be. He’s always asked too much of her. Look at the pain he’s caused.

After three minutes -then four, then five- she finally goes still. Her shoulders hike up, like wings, and it’s a gesture that’s achingly familiar.

“I could never stop you,” she says, not looking at him. “I can’t stop anyone,” she adds, mostly to herself, and Kaneki hears Ayato’s name sobbed out in the silence. His heart aches.

She stands up. The way she moves means she’s determined, as she crosses over to the counter and bends to search for something. “I knew you were coming,” she says, taking out a file. More than anything else, Kaneki’s taken aback that it’s not her favorite Sig Sauer, her constant companion through the years. He’d been so ready to die, even if he hadn’t completed his objective; if it was Touka-chan, his grief-fogged mind reasoned, it might not matter.

One bullet, one nameless corpse among many- it was a lot less trouble than having a former agent identified and shot down by the CCG at a funeral. Kaneki thinks about the string of cats in his quiet home in the country; about the potted plants, Cottonbud and Caramel.

“I told you not to, so of course you came. Here,” Touka says. She tosses the file on the table. Her voice is brittle, like her grief should have broken her down long ago. “I’m on duty, so I can’t explain how fucking stupid you are for having a death wish this big. But read that, top to bottom.”

Kaneki doesn’t want to. That much he knows. His world will collapse like a house of cards if he opens that file and sees the proof.

“It’s important,” Touka says. She sounds tired and angry, finally stalking over and shoving it open. “For god’s sake.”

Kaneki is reminded of Owl, and her story about Pandora’s Box. But he knows the answer he’s about to get; Touka is just trying to confirm it for him, to make the crushing weight of certainty crash down on his shoulders. He doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to know about how Hide died, he’d claw his heart out of his chest before he knew it for certain-

He reads it anyway.

The first tear falls on the paper. Touka cuts off her explanation about how the CCG got there too late; nothing Kaneki doesn’t know. The CCG had always, always kept a close eye on them both.

“He was _trapped,”_ Kaneki’s entire body shudders. “The building was on fire, Touka-chan, and Hide was _trapped,_ and no one went back to get him.”

Everything that’s been holding him together for so long snaps and gives. He loses himself in it: the knowledge that Hide’s gone.

_Hide’s gone._

He stops breathing, and every blood cell in his body seems to vibrate with agony. He drowns in it, with all of his shattered heart.

He doesn’t realize he’s screaming until Touka punches him hard enough to knock him across the room through the tables.

“Get out,” she snarls, her body trembling like a leaf. His eyes can’t focus, but he recognizes the venom in her voice. “ _Get out,_ go follow your boyfriend, _I don’t care.”_

She has to drag him out, because his legs won’t work. She slams the car door in his face and hisses instructions at the driver. Even in the middle of his mind unraveling itself, he knows that he’s being unfair on her: she’d liked Hide, surely she was grieving his death too. Hide had been a friend, a splash of sunlight, blazing bright with potential and kindness and a simple, unquestionable _joy_.

And now Hide was dead.

And if everything went his way, soon Kaneki will be, too.

*

They turn into the junction of the cemetery. Ten minutes left.

Kaneki raises his blank eyes from the report in the file.

“Wait,” he says.

*

**_-3 years_ **

In his moments of stasis, Kaneki daydreams about the shell of Hide’s ear.

Hide really had the prettiest ears Kaneki had ever seen. It wasn’t like he’d been looking out for them- it was merely a part of the string of observations that encompassed the Hide that lived in his mind, wedged in between notes like _lackluster hand-eye coordination_ and the face that he made when he had to eat celery. Hide’s ears were pink, and delicately rounded, and when Kaneki licked them they turned violently red and made Hide gasp. Kaneki has sense memory of how they tasted but he longs for it all the same.

Time that flowed gently acquires a sharper tinge, and the encroaching darkness of night falls heavy. It’s time, then; Kaneki glances briefly at his watch, then at the building six blocks away, where his targets are gathered around a table, with the exception of one.

Quietly, he closes his book. It’s _The_ _Black Goat’s Egg,_ an old favorite, the copy ragged and worn. On the flyleaf Rize-san’s name is written in her elegant cursive above the title. It’s the only one of her possessions he’d kept and the when he rereads it, her voice in his head grows soft and fond, like a mother’s would.

He’s been slipping into a lot of old habits lately, he thinks. Half-listening to Rize-san and Yamori as they chattered away at the back of his head, their heads bent secretively towards each other like old friends. Barely speaking for days on end, and completing missions using more destructive force than ever.

He doesn’t feel like he’s reverting, he’s simply drawing up his defenses. Working for Aogiri Tree makes it easier to take a step back and observe his surroundings. Everyone here is undoubtedly their own man, used to independent work; partnering up is a strictly temporary thing, a pooling of select resources until the mission’s complete.

That said, the partnerships rarely change. When the silence on his earpiece is finally broken, it’s by a voice that’s accompanied him through all the missions he’d taken since he’d joined Aogiri.

“Last target’s entered the building, Centipede,” says Ayato. “Wind speed at 11kts, direction’s north-northwest. You’re within stability range so the deflection off the glass shouldn’t count.” Kaneki has his reservations about that, but he keeps listening silently, his own calculations at work. “Take them out in the order we discussed.”

Kaneki hums his consent and goes over to the window. His M-21’s already been set up earlier, leaving him to simply lower his eye to the sniper scope and start shooting.

One shot, one kill: the glass explodes in a crescendo of light and sound and by the time the gathered men react, Kaneki has taken down three more of them, with four left. Panic makes their movements sluggish. In his ear, Ayato reminds him that their security was making their way into the meeting room, and Kaneki wishes he could swat away his voice like it was a fly.

“Just wait till the primary team comes through, and take them down together,” Ayato is saying. “They’re all trained and shit but they’re total amateurs, you have to- _what are you doing, are you a fucking moron?”_

Kaneki’s eye twitches with irritation, but his trigger finger is rock-steady. He’s bought three seconds by jamming the lock, making backup have to break down the door. Shot, shot, shot, shot, and then the job is done. Eight men lie around in different distances from the head table in a nest of shattered glass by the time security bursts in. Kaneki begins packing up.

Outside the apartment building, he slides into his hired car and begins driving directly west back to headquarters. “I appreciate your assistance, Black Rabbit,” he says softly, and hears Ayato snarl. He really does remind Kaneki of Touka. The family resemblance is the most striking when they’re angry, and they’re both nearly always angry. Kaneki finds it a little amusing, which of course makes them angrier.

Ayato, and Touka. Opposite sides of the coin, opposite sides of the war that grew bloodier and more violent by the day as the CCG and Anteiku began pushing harder, and Aogiri pushed back. Kaneki thinks about how much he loves Hide and feels a twinge of regret for giving Ayato a hard time.

There are police sirens approaching from downtown. Kaneki speeds up and stops thinking about anything at all.

*

The address that appears in his inbox after the job is for a café in Ward 14 near a bookstore Kaneki knows quite well. He sticks to the roofs and makes quick work of the CCG agents tailing him, without noise or struggle in one of the back alleys Hide used to love. After that, he adjusts his jacket and goes into the bookstore. He lingers for a good hour until the crowd grows thin enough that movement won’t be a problem, but with enough people to make anyone who wanted to make him disappear think twice.

At six fifteen, he buys the books he’s gathered on instinct and goes over to the café. The mail had told him (in between copious cheerful emojis) to mention the Owl at the entrance, and when he does, he’s lead to a quiet table at the back where someone is already waiting.

It turns out to be a girl, about twenty, with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She has striking eyes, one black, the other a kind of dull red, and her features are all small and delicate. She looks up when Kaneki slides into his seat.

“Hello,” says Kaneki. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. I’m Kaneki.”

She regards him with her deeply unsettling eyes. Her mouth is set in a firm line, but Kaneki can’t sense any active dislike from her. Rather, he thinks she’s almost curious about him, only bad at showing it.

Finally, she nods. “I know you.”

“You know me?”

“We were watching you today,” says the girl.

Kaneki’s hackles rise, though he gives no outward indication of his tension. “You mean the mission?”

She inclines her head, making her hair slide forward across her shoulder. “It was good.”

Kaneki waits for her to continue, but she lays her palms flat against the table, and he reads the gesture as her having said all she has to say on the subject. The way she speaks is odd, but not unpleasant: she’s stripping off everything but the bare bones of her sentences, and her inflection is almost flat.

“What’s your name?”

“Kurona,” she says. She takes a sip of her water and studies the glass for a moment.

“So, Kurona-san, who sent you to meet me?”

She shakes her head. Kaneki can’t tell whether this means _no, I won’t tell you who sent me_ or _no, I don’t know, either._ If she was sent here to only impart specific information, she’s doing a ridiculously good job.

At this point a waiter shows up and takes their orders; after he’s gone, Kaneki tries again. “You said ‘we’. Is someone else here with you, Kurona-san?”

“Shiro didn’t want to come,” Kurona says. A slight frown ripples through her forehead.

“Shiro?”

“My twin,” Kurona says. “She’s like you,” she adds, indicating his head with her hand.

“You mean,” he says carefully, “that her hair used to be black, like yours, before it turned white?”

She nods. “She’s like you,” she repeats.

“And what happened to make her black hair turn white, Kurona-san?”

She doesn’t answer. Charm seems to work about as well as spritzing her with water would, which Kaneki suspected from the start. She simply continues to look at Kaneki, and her expression says _it’s too soon to talk about that._

Their drinks arrive. She takes one sip of white wine before she sets it on the table. “You worked for the CCG.”

“Used to,” Kaneki says, easily. He’s had hundreds of iterations of this conversation with Ayato. “But I came over to Aogiri because your King promised to give me answers I couldn’t find back there.”

Kurona thinks about this for a while. “Why do you need answers.”

Kaneki thinks about the phrase that stood out to him on the screen, nearly half a year ago: _subjects aged 8 to 12 years old._ He thinks about Hide laughing with his head thrown back, soaking up the sunlight like he was part of it. Hide could have been one of those children who died in the experiments, buried in a shallow unmarked grave.

A world where Hide doesn’t survive, doesn’t get to grow up…that’s not a world Kaneki wants to imagine.

“Because it’s very important to me to find out, and stop them,” Kaneki says honestly.

Kurona reaches out and touches his white-knuckled fist gently. Surprise makes him flinch.

“I’m glad,” she says.

“You’re glad,” he repeats, and he smiles, realizing what he’d done. Apparently her style of speech is contagious. He wonders if it’ll have an effect on someone like Hide, whose every other word was part of a strange, often nonsensical, metaphor.

His fingers spasm. Sometimes he gets knocked breathless by how much he _needs_ to see Hide again, to breathe in the scent of his hair and hold him tight enough for his ribs to dig into his stomach.

“Because you have a reason,” Kurona explains.

The waiter appears again and sets their plates courteously, making a natural break in their conversation. Kurona leans back to sit straight again.

After he’s gone, Kaneki emits a long, slow sigh. When he smiles next it’s his usual, soft and distant. “I’m going to tell you what I know, or have guessed. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, Kurona-san.”

She sits up straighter, staring intently at him with her mismatched eyes. Kaneki takes this as consent.

“There are two projects that deal with young children being carried out by Aogiri Tree, with the intent of gathering power in the future and building an army of high-functioning soldiers. One is _in utero_ gene therapy performed while the child is still fetal, to modify height, strength, intelligence and memory, as well as getting rid of any hereditary disorders. The other is using repetitive magnetic stimulation to block a part of the brain, artificially creating savant syndrome to boost mathematic and mechanical skills. This happens when the kids are around ten years old.” 

Kurona’s expression doesn’t change all the while; her hands stay where they are, clasped on top of the table with her plate to the side.

“So where do they get these kids? All these procedures can cause organ failure, and more often than not the subjects -the children- die as a result. No sane parent would sign their child up for something like that. But most orphans don’t have the luxury of having someone even half-decent watch out for their best interests like that. And what’s basically a storehouse of orphans?”

Hide had said, _top of my class basically means I’m the only one who graduated. Those other poor suckers had to retake the exams, and I guess none of them made it ‘cause I’ve never seen them around._

Kaneki exhales. Stupid Hide, planting suspicions in his head. Brilliant, unhappy Hide, who knew something was wrong with the system that had protected him his whole life.

“The Counter-Espionage Training Academy,” Kaneki says, and a shadow of emotion passes across Kurona’s face. “The CCG collects orphans with potential from all around the country and bring them under the same roof, but even among them only the brightest are allowed to survive. The rest are shuttled off to some underground laboratory and are never heard of again. Am I right so far?”

Kurona contemplates her salad.

“A few survive,” she says.

“Not for long,” Kaneki points out. “The magnetic-”

“We will survive,” Kurona says sharply. Her fork clangs against her plate, and Kaneki thinks _I’m an idiot._ He’d attributed Kurona’s collection of oddities as part of the kind of character it took to work in this field, not the result of continued childhood torture.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her.

She doesn’t seem especially angry, so Kaneki wonders if she’s used to this. “It’s okay,” she says.

Her posture is attentive once more, as if she’s prepared to listen to more. It saves him from the nausea of her revelation, and what it means: he knows better than anyone the pain it takes to turn black hair white.

“Where are the tests on the fetuses being carried out?” Kaneki asks her directly. “The injections have to be given to pregnant women, who generally aren’t as easy to manipulate as young orphans. So that means they’re being lied to, by someone they trust, someone in the position to spread false information and make them think they were helping their babies. Someone like a doctor.”

Kurona looks away. Their seats have a limited view of the busy street outside, and she raises a hand to touch the glass, making Kaneki tense on instinct. But her expression is neutral, and her eyes are far away.

“You’re very smart, like they said,” she says. Her gaze lands back on his, unflinching.

Kaneki waits.

She takes a bite of salad, chewing it slowly and methodically.

“I like this song.”

Kaneki nods. He’d been listening to it too, when it became apparent she was paying it more attention than anything else. _Winter Wind:_ Rize-san used to play it when she was pleased about something.“Me too. You like Chopin?”

“Father listens to it.” She brings another forkful to her mouth, and eats it before elaborating, “He’s the one who told me to come. But in the end I didn’t have to tell you anything.”

With that, she rummages in the pockets of her coat and brings out a card. She slides it over the table.

“He says you would be his greatest experiment yet,” Kurona says.

She takes a final sip of her wine before reaching for her coat. She sat through the whole meal, so she must be able to stand him, at least. 

There are no civilities when she leaves, just a nod and a half-smile. Kaneki smiles back.

After she’s left the café, Kaneki takes a few sips of his wine, thinking. This is the first time his hypotheses were confirmed, but the timing must mean something. It took the Owl and the person Kurona called Father seven months to give him something solid to go on. Unless, of course, Kurona let him know more than she was supposed to.

And there are the finer details he hadn’t been able to clear up, before. Now it makes sense why Aogiri were so persistent in attacking Cochlea instead of protecting it as a precious supply of test subjects- they had moved on to testing on children a long time ago -long enough time for Kurona and her twin to grow up, at the very least- so the convicts in the CCG’s private jail were useless to them, and even a liability in case any of them had seen something.

He stays long enough for Kurona to make it to the station before he leaves. He looks at the business card she left while he waits. It reads:

_Kanou Akihiro_

_Kanou General Hospital_

and nothing else. On the reverse, startlingly neat letters say: _For to break free of this cage._

Kaneki pays the bill, picks up his books, and goes home smiling.

*

They come for him a week after his meeting with Kurona.

It’s inevitable, though Kaneki thinks he might have afforded to be more cautious, made it less obvious that he knew there was a leak in the CCG and made it seem like he was interested in the experiments alone.

But the link is maintained by someone, someone high profile enough to manipulate the records so that the CCG turned a blind eye to the missing students. That someone is posting all the CCG agents around Kaneki’s missions, armed with snipers; that someone sends leering mercenaries who don’t know what they’re in for to their death in Kaneki’s apartment, dozens of them a week. That someone is hunting Kaneki down like a dog.

“Oi Centipede, you’re wasting time.”

Filtered through the earpiece, for a brief moment, Ayato becomes Touka. Ayato has Touka’s abrasive kindness, angrier, less subtle. Kaneki smiles down at his hands.

“Yeah, sure.”

Kaneki enters the last password into the keypad, and the door of the chamber slides open, letting out a sigh of cold air.

“Alright, the case should have a transparent part, so check whether the liquid’s still inside,” Ayato says curtly. “There’s- _fuck,_ Centipede, movement behind you.”

Kaneki turns around. He feels the bullet that whizzes past his face, missing him by a hair and embedding itself on the reinforced steel wall.

“There shouldn’t be a backup security system,” Ayato breathes, sounding angry and frantic. “All the guards were taken down, _how the fuck-”_

“If you’re going to shoot, please don’t miss and let the target read where you are,” says a smooth, soft voice. “Now he’s going to be very troublesome.”

The figure that detaches itself from the shadows is familiar, but also not; Kaneki can pick up a top-tier agent but not much else. The air around him is still. Kaneki can barely sense his presence at all.

Ayato swears. “We’ve been set up. Fucking stool pigeons and traitors from the CCG everywhere.”

Kaneki’s living on borrowed time. The CCG is unyielding in its manhunt for the great traitor, but he thought it’d take them longer than this to track him down.

“Kaneki-kun,” says the man. He has a row of piercings along his ear and a smattering on his face, and his face is like marble, completely still. “Don’t you think you’ve been running long enough? The CCG is very disappointed. You were supposed to be extraordinary. With you, they planned to get rid of Aogiri Tree completely.”

Ayato says, “Remember the map. Two meters behind you and one to the left. There’s-”

“Ah, but you opened Pandora’s Box, didn’t you?”

Kaneki stiffens. In his ear, Ayato demands, “The fuck is that creep on about?”

Kaneki pulls out his earpiece in one smooth motion and steps on it, shattering it to pieces. _There,_ he thinks. _Touka-chan, that’s the most I could do for both of you. I’m sorry._

To the man, he says, “And who are you here on behalf of? The CCG, or Aogiri?”

Piercings laughs. It’s a melodic sound, and Kaneki wonders how his eyes can remain so cold. “Does it really matter, Kaneki-kun? They all stand to lose heavily if you continue to live, knowing what you do. But if you’re very fond of specifics, I’d say that I was protecting no one but my own best interests. After all, it wouldn’t do to have my dealings with Aogiri found out.”

 _My,_ he’d said, almost as if baiting Kaneki. The implication is clear: he’s the only double agent Aogiri has up their sleeve, and if Kaneki takes him down now, he could settle this whole business.

But even hunted and desperate, Kaneki knows better. By saying _neither the CCG or Aogiri Tree,_ this man means both. He has the means and resources to make Kaneki’s life a living hell. He would be running for the rest of his life.

“And, you know, some of us are very interested in showing you a practical demonstration of all the things you were so curious about,” Piercings hums. “We made you come over because you showed so much promise. Will you hold out on us, Kaneki-kun?”

Kaneki keeps silent. Connecting the dots. Kanou wants him as a guinea pig, and the CCG wants him dead. Piercings is ambivalent, almost affectionately so; if Kaneki doesn’t want to be held captive and experimented on the rest of his life, he can die here.

“Now, that said, will you come quietly, or will you insist on taking on my entire team?” asks Piercings, still unnervingly polite.

Kaneki stares at him. _Two meters behind and one to the left._ Not many people knew how to account for intelligent handlers; every agent thinks on their feet, and solid information, the kind Ayato supplied him with, tends to get ignored. Kaneki knows, because Kaneki used to do the same thing. Before Hide.

“Neither sounds appealing,” he says honestly, and begins to run.

*

He’s barely begun healing from the bullet wounds from his run-in with the double agent when Kaneki lets his feet lead him to where he wants to be the most.

Hide’s bathroom still has a pair of toothbrushes, white and yellow. Seeing them wait for him hopefully makes Kaneki’s heart break. It’s when the last of his misgivings dissolve: even after all this time, Hide was waiting for him, like all Kaneki had done was go out to the store to get eggs.

He touches the handles reverently, and looks around the rest of the bathroom. Hide’s bath is a study in gleeful pretention- he’d wanted something, he said, that screamed _secret service._ The result is a ruthlessly chic chrome and limestone atrocity with a rubber ducky sitting on the edge. Kaneki liked baths more than Hide did, and he remembers sitting in here for long, lazy hours reading and Hide coming into the room when he was tired to hang on his shoulders like a limpet.

The force of how much he wants to see Hide again makes him freeze up for a while. Then, carefully, he goes out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

He checks all the other rooms this way; collecting pieces of happiness he and Hide had together- in the kitchen, teaching Hide how to cook and watering his plants. In the study, leaning over Hide’s shoulder to read the reports on his laptop and then ducking in for long, sloppy kisses that lasted hours. In the homey bedroom, connecting the freckles that dot Hide’s cheeks with his lips and tongue, watching the beautiful curve of Hide’s spine as he arched up into Kaneki.

It wasn’t that Kaneki hasn’t fallen in love before, or had his feelings returned. But with Hide he had slotted into a space in the world instead of coasting through it, and loving Hide had meant loving himself. No one had given him a gift of that magnitude before. Kaneki wanted to repay him.

 He closes the last door and resigns himself to waiting in the living room, when,

“Alright, hands where I can see them. How the _fuck_ did you get in here?”

The soft _click_ of the tab dropping into position of a semi-automatic, echoing in the silence. Kaneki exhales through his nose. Hide’s apartment feels like it’s come alive, the walls breathing with its owner inside.

“You didn’t change your passwords,” Kaneki says softly.  

Kaneki listens for sounds of recognition; he doesn’t hear any. Instead there’s a muffled _thump._ When he turns around, he sees that Hide’s knees have given way and hit the carpet.

Kaneki’s eyes widen.

“Kaneki, I-” Hide’s eyes leak tears in a fast, thick stream. He brushes at his face, not looking away from Kaneki for a second. His chest shudders with the short, jerky breaths he’s taking. “ _You came home.”_

Kaneki’s body unfreezes, one muscle at a time. He kneels next to Hide on the carpet, hovering close, hesitant. “Aren’t you glad?” he asks, half-teasing.

Hide bites his lip. His eyes are fanned with tears, cheeks red; he’s so beautiful when he cries.

He’s beautiful when he cries but Kaneki wants to see him smile.

“I am.”

“Then why are you crying?” Kaneki whispers.

Hide coughs out a laugh. His hands come up to Kaneki’s face, warm, solid, Hide’s long clever fingers resting on his cheekbones. “They’re tears of joy. Learn to read a situation, jeez.”

Kaneki smiles with him. He brushes a tear from the shadow of Hide’s lashes with his thumb, and when he’s done, Hide surges up and kisses him.

It’s desperate, a little messy. Hide’s still crying but he’s starting to grin as well, and Kaneki holds on too tight, his fingers curling around Hide’s arms bruisingly. Kaneki pulls him closer and Hide comes with a moan, throwing his arms around Kaneki’s neck and sliding a hand up his hair.

Hide hums Kaneki’s name once they part, his lips bruised and red, dried tear tracks on his cheeks. He’s grinning, looking self-consciously happy in that way that means he wants to do something ridiculous like shout a love confession from the rooftop but is afraid he’ll jinx it. Kaneki’s heart _aches_.

His smile slides off when he sees Kaneki’s expression. He says Kaneki’s name again, questioning this time.

Kaneki doesn’t say anything. Has never had to. Hide always gets it in the end.

“This isn’t you coming home,” Hide says, wonder in his tone. “That wasn’t a _I’m home_ kiss.”

Kaneki shakes his head.

Hide’s mouth twists into something tight and desperately sad. Hide has a mouth made for smiles and jokes, and Kaneki is confident that once this is over, he’ll go back to looking like that again. He doesn’t want Hide to learn caution or shutter himself away, but anything that makes Hide realize that agents like him were no good was surely for the best.

He looks like the question stings the inside of his mouth, but he spits it out anyway: “Then what was it.”

_Goodbye._

Kaneki swallows it down. Selfishly, he still doesn’t want Hide to hate him. Instead he falls back on something more familiar: “You know what Chekhov said about guns in stories?”

 Hide’s head jerks up so that his bangs no longer cover his eyes. The shine in them is gone, but Kaneki does see the reassuring whir of his brain. It’s enough, he tells himself. Hide’s strong enough. “That once they showed up, they had to be fired?”

Kaneki raises his eyebrows despite himself, and Hide flushes. “Shut up, just because I don’t walk around with my nose in a book doesn’t mean I can’t read.”

Kaneki is struck with the urge to tease him longer, to see if he can make Hide laugh one more time. But that would be unfair to both of them.

“Yeah,” he says. “It means there aren’t any unused props in stories.”

He picks up the semi-automatic still lying next to Hide’s hand. It’s German-made, probably CCG-issued. He flicks the safety off and then on again, feeling the weight of it. It’s not the one he remembers. He half-smiles. “Amon-san got you a new one?”

Hide’s luminous eyes are wide. He blinks in confusion, first at Kaneki, then at the gun. As Kaneki waits, Hide slowly nods.

“Hm,” says Kaneki. “It’s personalized, as far as I can tell. The weight is good. It’ll be easier to aim.” He tilts it, so that the metal catches the light and throws off a dull gleam.

Then he presses it back towards Hide’s slack hand.

“What,” Hide says in a tiny, scared voice. “Kaneki, what does that mean.”

“Two weeks from now, Aogiri Tree is going to launch another attack on Cochlea,” Kaneki says, low and fast. “The Owl will be in charge. But at the same time, I’ll be blowing up a secret underground lab across the road.” He takes a breath, not looking away from Hide’s wide eyes. “When that happens, both the CCG and Aogiri will come after me. I want you to do me a favor.”

He takes Hide’s hand, still gripping the gun loosely, and brings it up to his forehead.

“No,” whispers Hide. “No, not that.”

Kaneki strokes his cheekbone as gently as he can. Hide keeps shaking his head like a frightened child, and Kaneki’s heart shudders. “I’m doing this because I have to, but I don’t want to be locked up, not again.” On cue, in his head, Yamori cracks his knuckles; Rize-san is still laughing, hasn’t ever stopped. “Do you believe me?”

Hide stills. He looks like he barely understands what’s going on, but Kaneki recognizes the instinct to take every word he says to heart. Hide loves him, and wants to hear him out. Kaneki’s gratitude doesn’t mean much, but he feels overwhelmed with it, at how Hide can put aside how insane the situation is, to consider Kaneki’s selfish requests. _He gives everything to me._

Slowly, Hide seems to start unraveling what’s been said.

Kaneki repeats, softly, “Hide, do you believe me?”

Hide looks wrecked, but he nods. “This is something you have to do. Something you think is worth your life.” He looks away.

Kaneki touches his face, urging him to meet his eyes. “I’m only asking because you’re the only one who’ll do this for me.”

“You’re the best, so I try my hardest,” Hide mumbles. He stares at the spot above Kaneki’s shoulder, then at his own hands, flinching when he sees the gun. “That’s how we always worked, huh.”

He’s doing that thing where he disconnects, mentally taking a step back to assess the situation. Kaneki can’t let that happen- can’t let Hide get involved any further, so he kisses him again, light and chaste.

“Two weeks,” Kaneki says, before drawing Hide into his arms, resting his chin on top of Hide’s shock of hair. It feels like there’s a fire inside him, burning steady and hot, and even it won’t go out even if he dies.

Hide holds him back fiercely, and the fire burns brighter than ever. “Two weeks,” he says, and it sounds like a promise.

*

Two weeks later, Kaneki sets the last of the explosives and checks the connection. He strolls back across the main rooms, checking that the holding cells are empty as he goes. It’s late enough that all the workers and scientists have gone home; the machines stand towering in the labs in the half-dark like creatures from myths.

The main room has just one person in it; two, when Kaneki steps in.

“Welcome,” Kanou says, and opens his arms.

*

**_Now_ **

 Touka picks up on the second ring. “Where are you?” she barks out immediately.

Kaneki looks out the window and mentions the street name. Touka swears, making him raise his eyebrows.

“I’ve already passed that place,” she explains with no hint of self-consciousness, and he thinks, _there you are._ Polished and beautiful, but still the same soft Touka-chan. “Coming back now. Have you come to your senses?”

Kaneki doesn’t say anything for a beat, and she goes quiet as well. Her maturity wasn’t an act after all.

“Touka-chan, why are you coming here?” he asks presently. From the rearview mirror, he can see the driver shooting him apprehensive looks. Kaneki had made him park in the nearest available space, and he seems twitchier than he had been before Kaneki ordered him around in a voice like the steel of a naked blade, refusing to be denied.

 “I was going to get you before you barged in on the CCG and all those other people who want to see you dead or locked up or both,” Touka says. “Took a shortcut, but now it’s taking longer to double back. Shit.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Because even on reflex you’ll take down half of them before they get the chance to lay a finger on you, and that’s a pain to deal with,” she replies without missing a beat. “Ah, here we are.”

A comically oversized black jeep pulls up next to the sedan on the small street, and Kaneki watches the rookie jump.

“Get in,” Touka shouts, after winding her window down, much to the nervy rookie’s shock. “And you,” she addresses the driver, “I’m on a break, so tell the Manager I stepped out for a bit.”

Kaneki doesn’t hear his response, busy switching cars. “Won’t you get in trouble for this, Touka-chan?”

“Hm, probably,” Touka says. “The new guy’s kind of a stick in the mud. He’s got us in good with the CCG again, so I can’t complain. His rules are the reason I couldn’t talk properly back in the shop, it’s a huge pain.”

“Does he also tell you to keep your mouth shut so that you won’t ruin the customers’ illusions?”

Touka shoots him an unimpressed glance. “I think I prefer it when you’re all gloomy and depressed.”

They fall silent again. Touka takes a turn into the main road and Kaneki reflexively fears for his life. Driving, apparently, isn’t something Touka had matured in.

He remembers this jeep, the way its tires skid when Touka is merciless and worried.

Three years ago, when there had been a CCG sniper on the roof of the building, blotting out a piece of the night sky. Hide had to be somewhere close, running backup for the field agent, his semi-automatic ready to fabricate an accident.

But that had somehow lost importance compared to what was directly before him.

The Owl and six Aogiri agents were coming towards him, their masks catching the lights from the surrounding shop signs as they approached. They weren’t interested in taking him in dead. And with the CCG agent disabled by a lack of orders for this change -only Arima had permission to engage the Owl in the whole CCG, but she also had a higher priority than Kaneki himself- the Owl would pull it off.

Kaneki had miscalculated. The attack on Cochlea had been a hoax.

He had sighed, and prepared to do his level best to die, aware that if they took him down, it was all over. But it never came to that.

“That day,” Kaneki says softly, as Touka wedges the jeep in traffic. “After Kanou’s lab went down. You came to get me. How?”

Touka taps her fingers on the steering wheel, scowls a little at the traffic. “That was Anteiku territory. We’d won it over a week before.” She sighs at his expression. “We like to dress it up, but if it wasn’t for their weird obsession with terrorism, Aogiri’s just like us. We might be a gang of highly-trained assassins and agents, and some of us can single-handedly take down the government of a small country, but we’re still a gang.”

It sounds smooth, falling from her lips. Kaneki wonders how long she’s been waiting to say those words to him.

“So Anteiku took my case over, because it was their territory.” The Owl had been barely able to contain her rage as Yoshimura-san bowed to them and lead Kaneki away. Her eyes through her mask had been consumed with a burning intensity. “How didn’t Aogiri Tree plan for that?”

“Because it was newly claimed, and no one really takes the rules seriously,” Touka says. The traffic’s finally moving, and she pulls into a road next to a sign that points out the airport. Was that where they were going? Kaneki honestly has no idea. “It was a crazy bet made at the last minute by a lovesick idiot with a twisty brain, and I still have no idea why we went with it.”

Kaneki knows this part, only if it’s in the back of his mind, as a series of memories and beliefs. _I’ll work hard,_ Hide had said, and his eyes had been clear and his expression determined when he said _two weeks._

He raises a hand to his stinging eyes. Hide had worked hard for that third option, put everything into it. He really is amazing.

 _The world isn’t being written by Chekhov,_ Hide had said in the only note he had passed to him through Touka. _Some guns don’t have to be fired._

“He’s alive,” Kaneki says. His hands shake. “Isn’t he?”

Touka doesn’t say anything. But she’s rolling her eyes, which means, _took you long enough._

*

 _Time losing all meaning_ is a phrase Kaneki had always found counter-intuitive. Time wasn’t just a hazy hypothetical to be pegged down by the tethers of definition. Time was stamped like a handprint across the world, a part of it that couldn’t be shrugged off. Time attaches itself to meaning, not the other way around.

But now -sometimes- he wonders if the poets were right after all. After he found out that Hide had been declared dead, seconds sometimes turned into hours and days rushed past when he blinked. He had been missing Hide for a very long time, but with the news, love turned into grief and he lost any footholds he had. No matter how much time went by, Hide wouldn’t come back to him. And so, time really did stop meaning anything.

He thinks, _Hide’s alive,_ and it feels like the ground shifts beneath his feet. A sound like thunder crashes across his head- the clocks starting up again.

 _Hide’s alive,_ he thinks again just to feel his heart swoop and his skin prickle. _Alive, Hide’s alive._

Touka drops him near the airport and Kaneki is reminded of a lifetime past- he’d had jobs of every conceivable nature in airports, from assassination to simply picking up important luggage. His mind has a habit of drifting when he’s too flustered to focus on the matter on hand, so he dwells on times long gone and tries not to hope.

He doesn’t know which flight he’s on, so he wanders past a handful of terminals before he pulls himself together and checks the announcements.

There’s a flight back to Kyushu in just under an hour.

Kaneki blinks at the number, then at the gate. His ears are ringing again, but he doesn’t feel like he’s slowly being buried underneath six feet of earth anymore. Every heartbeat is a giddy promise.

 He throws caution to the winds and starts running, his feet skidding on the tiles and catching on carpet. The smaller domestic flights are further away, and he’s worked up a light sweat by the time he makes it to Gate 5.

He draws to a halt. People bustle around him, families dragging fleets of luggage, businesspeople with compact cases clicking past on high heels and polished leather shoes. Someone bumps into him, and backs away, apologizing; Kaneki doesn’t even twitch.

There’s only one person in Gate 5, and it’s a silhouette that’s engraved into Kaneki’s heart like the story of a beloved book, or a favorite memory.

He inhales Hide’s name.

He’s not surprised _at all_ when the figure turns around- Hide’s instincts were the sharpest he’s ever seen, after all. Longer hair, the roots showing more than Kaneki remembers, brown eyes wide and growing wider. It’s like the memory of him falling away from Kaneki’s eyes to reveal the reality of it; of him, of _Hide_ , alive and whole and real.

Hide looks _terrible_ : there are dark, dark circles around his eyes, his arm’s in a sling, and he’s so thin it hurts to look at him.

He’s the best thing Kaneki’s ever seen.

He doesn’t know how he covers the distance, just that he blinks and Hide’s suddenly closer. He keeps drinking in the sight of him, greedy, half-disbelieving.

He raises a hand to touch Hide’s face and Hide closes his eyes, shivering. “Was gonna surprise you,” he mumbles, and Kaneki’s hand trembles when he speaks. “Pop into your country house and laugh at your expression.”

“ _I thought you were dead,”_ rasps Kaneki, and then curses himself. That’s not important. He doesn’t know why he said that, when Hide was here, every one of Kaneki’s best dreams come true.

Hide opens his eyes and smiles a tired, happy smile. “I’m not,” he says simply. “I’m right here.”

The disbelief gets punched out of Kaneki, and something inside him collapses. He gathers Hide in his arms, careful of his broken arm. He’d have to ask about that later- and ask about how exactly he faked his death so the CCG believed it.

But all of that is so very unimportant when they had all the time in the world.

Hide kisses his neck. “Missed you so much,” he mumbles. “You’re never leaving me again, don’t,” he yawns, and staggers on his feet, “don’t _do_ that to me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kaneki says. Hide grins into his skin and hangs on a little tighter. Then, because it’s another truth that’s too big for him to hold in, he adds, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Hide says instantly, leaning back to look into his eyes. “Kaneki, I love you _so_ much. You knew that, right?”

Kaneki did; it was gigantic and wonderful and incomprehensible, but Kaneki never doubted that Hide loved him.

It must show on his face, because Hide laughs and tucks himself back against Kaneki. “Then let’s go home,” he says, muffled against Kaneki’s chest. “Haven’t slept in, like, a month, so…sleep…sex…dinner. And… hey Kaneki, do you farm or something?” he asks, drawing back again, eyes sparkling.

Kaneki makes a face at him, even as his heart swells with affection. “No, I don’t farm, Hide.”

Hide scrunches his nose. “But what do people _do_ in the country?”

Kaneki kisses him. He can’t help it. “They read,” he murmurs, and grins.

“Ah, you can’t make me change my mind with your tricks, I’m still coming with you.” Hide pulls him back in for another kiss, then another. His lips are soft and warm, pulled into a smile.

“Let’s go home, Kaneki,” he says, and Kaneki nods.

“Yeah,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> And there it is! Chapter 2 was supposed to follow the events of Root A, but I wanted to keep the focus on hidekane so a few actual events got chopped off. As usual, forgive the inaccuracies, and thanks for reading!


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